Graham Hancock challenges mainstream archaeology’s rigid timelines, citing 23,000-year-old footprints in New Mexico and the Amazon’s 10,000-year-old geoglyphs aligned with ancient constellations. He questions the Sphinx’s age (12,500+ years) and Gobekli Tepe’s carvings, linking them to the Younger Dryas comet impact (~12,800 years ago). Hancock advocates for psychedelics like DMT—backed by $1.5M research—to explore consciousness beyond death, contrasting pharmaceutical industry suppression with AI’s potential to decode lost scripts (e.g., Easter Island’s Rongo-Rongo). Their discussion suggests humanity’s past may hold advanced civilizations and technologies erased by dogma, while AI could either reveal truths or deepen existential detachment. [Automatically generated summary]
Do you think that's because the people that are in control of archaeology, the academics, the professors, these people have written books on these things, have lectured on these things, and they've been very specific about timelines and dates.
Yeah, I think it's a complicated, it's a complicated mixture of things.
First of all, because archaeology is so desperate to be seen as a science, it tries as hard as possible to distance itself from any ideas that might be seen as woo-woo.
You know, anything out on the edge, archaeology doesn't want to associate itself with.
And then it takes the next step and really seeks to attack out-on-the-edge ideas.
Now, I don't know why the possibility of a lost civilization during the Ice Age should be an out-on-the-edge idea.
We've had lost civilizations before.
The Indus Valley civilization today in Pakistan wasn't known about until the 1920s.
It was found by accident.
And every turn of the archaeologist's spade can reveal new information.
But the reaction to my proposal that we've forgotten an episode in the human story, it's always been hostile since I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995.
But with Ancient Apocalypse's much bigger platform reaching a much wider audience, the reaction was just hysterical.
And it went on for a very long time.
And it appeared to be, it appeared to me, I don't think it's a conspiracy.
I don't think archaeologists are involved in a conspiracy.
I think the people who are attacking me genuinely believe in what they're saying and they genuinely think I'm harmful.
But that's like calling it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
I mean, whatever they did, however they did it, is unbelievably extraordinary.
And I think pointing that out is amazing.
I mean, what you're discovering and what you're showing on that show is that there are a lot of mysteries when it comes to the history of human beings, and we should embrace those mysteries because there's concrete, irrefutable evidence, especially in terms of like Gobekli Tepe and some of the other structures.
I mean, this is wild stuff.
The idea that human beings had an advanced civilization 10,000, 20,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, what happened?
And that's why it's Ancient Apocalypse, because we know that there was a global cataclysm, a slow one, 1,200 years long between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, called the Younger Dryas.
There's still arguments about what caused it, but the fact that it was cataclysmic is not really disputed.
The accusations that were put against me and the show of being, the accusations included the words racist, white supremacist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic.
So what the archaeologists were doing there, they were going back to Fingerprints of the Gods that I wrote in 1995, in which I reported indigenous traditions about the appearance of bearded foreigners bringing knowledge after a cataclysm to the shattered survivors of that cataclysm.
And in some cases, in those traditions, those knowledge bringers are described as white-skinned.
And that is why the show was accused of racism, because archaeology has since taken the view that all of those stories were made up by the Spanish.
And that seems to me completely ridiculous.
Both in Mexico and in Peru and Bolivia, we have traditions.
We have them Viracocha, we have Quetzalcoatl, we have Bochica.
This is a pan-American myth.
And actually, I think it's racist of archaeology to imagine that the magic powers of the Spaniards could impose a myth upon indigenous peoples all over the Americas, that they'd just be so stupid that they would fall for this story told by the Spaniards.
Of course, these are indigenous myths and traditions.
And I was reporting them in that book, and I stand by them.
And it turns out that there's actually a huge argument within academia about this.
And my critics were just giving one side of that argument.
Well, the other side of the argument that it's inconceivable that the Spaniards made up these stories.
These stories were reported to the first Spanish visitors in Mexico and in Peru.
They were reported to them by indigenous peoples as indigenous myths.
And the fact that they're right spread across the Americas makes it very unlikely.
I mean, if it was one story, but if it's a dozen stories and they're told over a huge geographical region, the notion that this is a Spanish conspiracy, it's an ultimate conspiracy theory.
I don't think we should take away these traditions from the indigenous people who reported them.
But it gave a very useful handle for people to attack this series on.
And by the way, on that point, I have never, in anything that I've written or anything that I've broadcast, ever myself suggested that white races were involved.
Actually, it would be quite stupid to do so.
Because if you look at Europe during the Ice Age, and I'm talking about a lost civilization of the Ice Age, Northern Europe and North America were absolutely inhospitable wildernesses during the Ice Age.
They were frozen, they were dry, and they were dangerous.
And they were not the places that people would go.
People naturally gravitated south towards the equator, towards the tropics.
That's where I would expect to find traces of a lost civilization.
And that's where I do find traces of a loss of light.
You don't really find – I've never reported anything about the UK – For example, in my books, we have Stonehenge, we have Avery, we have these Stone Circles, but they're not old enough.
That was the time when the UK started to get warmer.
And it's the same with the rest of Northern Europe.
And it's the same with the northern part of North America.
You have to go down to the southern part of North America.
You have to go into Mexico.
You have to go into South America to really find an environment during the Ice Age that would have nurtured a high civilization.
Well, again, this is an area where there has been a narrative that archaeology has sought to impose upon us.
And this was called the Clovis first idea, that there was a people who archaeologists call the Clovis people.
We don't know what they call themselves, in North America.
And traces of their characteristic tools, particular sort of fluted points, arrowhead spear points, turn up from about 13,400 years ago and end abruptly 12,800 years ago.
And for a long time, with the beginning of the Younger Dryas.
And for a long time, archaeology maintained that this Clovis culture, so-called Clovis culture, we don't know what they call themselves, were the first Americans, and that there were no human beings in the Americas before 13,400 years ago.
Bit by bit, the new evidence has come in which has forced archaeologists, screaming and tearing out their hair, to back away from the Clovis first paradigm and admit that actually, yes, there were people here before that.
But even then, they're reluctant to go very far back.
We've recently had these footprints in white sands in New Mexico, 23,000 years old or so.
That's largely being accepted now.
But there are much earlier dates.
There's 130,000 years ago from the Ceruti Mastodon site near San Diego.
Yeah, what I see again is an unfortunate mindset where a new and interesting idea is proposed, supported by massives of evidence and published in Nature.
You know, nature has a pretty high bar to what it accepts.
And then the critics look for any way to get rid of it.
Yeah, well, he recently started a bone rush in the East River.
Because it turns out that during the, what was it, like the 1920s or 1930s, stuff that they had taken from his land before he owned it, they had dumped some of it because they had so much of it.
They dumped it in the East River.
And they were balking at it.
But meanwhile, these people have found it there.
So here it goes.
I think many of you are intrigued by these Ice Age bones found in the Boneyard Alaska.
If you zoom in, you'll see that it's been sanded or somehow been worked down to a smooth finish on the end.
I'm going to carbon date one of them.
I'll post the results when I do.
So this was three weeks ago, so it's probably going to take a little longer.
And we'll look forward to seeing the dating results.
But the fact that we're dealing with megafauna that went extinct between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago implies very strongly that it's at least that old.
And therefore, it seems very unhunter-gatherer-like activity to completely destroy the megafauna.
And the other thing is the simultaneous extinction of large numbers of creatures that is happening very, very, very quickly suggests to me that we're looking at a disaster of some sort.
And that's why the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which is solid science, although undoubtedly disputed, which suggests that multiple fragments of a disintegrating comet hit the Earth 12,800 years ago, many of them didn't hit the Earth.
Many of them exploded in the sky.
They were not that big, maybe 100 meters in diameter.
So they were airbursts, but they leave these characteristic signatures in the ground.
30th of June, 1908, happens to be at the peak of the beta torrids, and the torrid meteor stream is identified as the likely culprit for what happened in the Younger Dryas.
wildfires burning, you get these impacts smashing into the earth, bursting in the air over forests.
It caused huge fires and that's why you get enormous amounts of charcoal as a result.
And then the larger objects, it's thought, hit the North American ice cap and caused a very large amount of meltwater to flow into the world ocean.
And that's what brought temperatures down at the beginning of the younger dryers.
We can argue there are alternative theories.
Maybe solar activity was involved.
Robert Schock prefers a change in solar activity.
And, you know, kudos to Robert.
He's a brilliant scientist and he's put his neck on the line by advocating a much older Sphinx.
Any scientist these days in the field of archaeology who sticks his neck out and says that the archaeological narrative is wrong immediately gets massively attacked.
And I think that's most unfortunate.
A couple of points I'd like to make about this.
First of all, we said at the beginning, most archaeology, certainly in the industrialized countries, is a result of a dam or a road being built and archaeologists being called in to see if there's anything there.
It's not a targeted search.
It's kind of random.
Something's happening and archaeologists go in there.
And then there's huge areas of the world that have had very little archaeology done in them.
Those include the Amazon rainforest where I've just been.
I've been three weeks in the Brazilian Amazon and another couple of weeks in Peru.
And there are extraordinary revelations coming out of the Amazon rainforest.
Now, the Amazon rainforest, up until very recently, had very little archaeology done.
You're talking about six million square kilometers of the Earth's surface, which has hardly been touched by archaeology.
And now it is being touched by archaeology.
Thanks to LIDAR, which is identifying enormous structures under the canopy, we're finding that we have to rewrite the whole story of the Amazon, that there were potentially populations of millions living in the Amazon, that there were cities.
They were joined by roads hundreds of kilometers in length.
All of these things are recent discoveries which says we should be thinking again about the Amazon.
Same goes for the submerged continental shells.
27 million square kilometers of the best real estate on Earth that were above water during the Ice Age are underwater now.
Yes, there's been some marine archaeology, but not enough to rule out the possibility of a lost civilization.
And the same with the Sahara Desert, 9 million square kilometers.
A little bit of archaeology done, but before archaeologists say there was no lost civilization, this is what the Society for American Archaeology said in their open letter to Netflix, complaining about my show.
They said, we know that there was no lost civilization during the Ice Age.
And my question to them is, how can they possibly know that when they've looked at relatively small areas of the Earth?
The picture is not complete.
They should be saying, we don't think there was a lost civilization during the Ice Age.
Fine.
But to say we know there wasn't, that's completely wrong.
dates that archaeologists like every everything before those dates they say oh they just made it up how crazy is that wouldn't it be a fascinating alternative if you were an archaeologist to go you know what maybe this king's list is legit maybe this thing really is 30 40 000 years old and maybe that explains a lot and now we have to figure out how'd they do it it would be a fascinating alternative but but unfortunately it's not the way That archaeology works at the moment.
I repeat, a lot of archaeologists have accused me of accusing them of a conspiracy against me and trying to make you look like a kook.
Yeah, I don't see any conspiracy.
I see people who do believe what they're saying and who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present that I must be neutralized in any way possible.
And that's a sad state of affairs.
Science should embrace and explore new and different ideas.
And particularly when it comes to the human past.
Look, I mean, if I get in an airplane, I do want the pilot to be a properly qualified pilot.
I want him to have undergone all the training and to be really good at what he does.
But flying an airplane and studying the human past are two different things.
And archaeologists often compare themselves to airline pilots.
They say you wouldn't get in an airplane without a properly trained pilot.
So why are you studying the past without a properly trained archaeologist?
And what I say is you've got blinkers on.
You've got a very narrow perspective on what the past could be.
And you're defending and protecting that perspective and imposing a narrative about the past on the public.
And that's where we get into a kind of religious aspect of this, that they become the high priests of the past.
If you just say the word Atlantis to Zahi Hawas, he goes absolutely goes nuts.
And that's irrational, too.
Since we know that the Atlantis story comes from Plato, we know that Plato said the source of that story was in ancient Egypt, in the Temple of Neith at Sis in the Delta.
An ancestor, Solon, visited that temple and was told the story, which he put into the word.
Atlantis is not an ancient Egyptian word.
That's one of the problems.
But he called it Atlantis.
But at Edfu in Upper Egypt, there's a whole story of a homeland of the primeval ones that was destroyed in a great cataclysm and flooded by the sea, leaving only a few survivors who traveled around the world seeking to restart civilization.
It's told very clearly in the Edfu building texts, which fortunately have now been completely translated, sadly only into German.
I hope we'll see the full English translation in due course.
But the translations I was working from when I first studied them are very good and they've been reinforced and supported by this new Fuller translation.
So I think the Atlantis story does have an ancient Egyptian origin and I think the ancient Egyptians, Egyptians, should be proud of it rather than throwing it away.
And also, archaeologists should not seek to isolate the story of Atlantis from other flood myths and traditions all around the world.
And that's a problem too.
I mean, we have hundreds of myths and traditions from countries all around the globe which speak of a great global cataclysm, a huge flood, often wildfires, destruction of human beings and of animals, a few survivors who seek to restart civilization.
It's a global story, not a single story told by Plato.
And it's interesting with the physical evidence, like Gobekli Tepe, which is 11,600 years old.
I mean, it used to be argued Robert Schoch and John Anthony West's work on the Great Sphinx, suggesting that the Sphinx could be 12,000 plus years old.
It used to be argued that was impossible because there was no other site anywhere in the world, no other megalithic site of the same age.
And then we discover Gobekli Tepe, and it's 11,600 years old.
Now, if you can make Gobekli Tepe with its 20-ton megaliths beautifully carved representations of human and animal figures in those pillars, if you can do that, you can cut the Great Sphinx out of bedrock as well.
There's no reason to dismiss the geological evidence of the Great Sphinx anymore.
But instead, what archaeology is doing is trying to finesse Gobekli Tepe.
They're trying to say, oh, there was this gradual build-up to Gobekli Tepe, and they now talk about a people who they call the Natufians.
Again, we don't know what they call themselves, who were predecessors of Gobekli Tepe around 14,000 years ago.
And they show things that look like a tiny little stone wall that they built.
The sort of thing that you can find, a dry stone wall that you can find anywhere in Wales to this day, you know.
And this is supposed to be a prequel to Gobekli Tepe.
I'm sorry, you just don't start off making dry stone walls and then wake up one morning and create 20 ton megaliths in huge stone circles, perfectly astronomically aligned as we have at Gobekli Tepe.
I've stood on top of one megalith that they partially cut out of the bedrock with the T-shape, but then they found a fault in it and they left it there.
It would have been a 30-ton megalith.
They clearly intended to release it from the bedrock, but it had a fault, so they left it alone.
The quarries, the issue of the quarries for the rock at Gobekli Tepe is not too big a problem.
I think that what we're looking at at Gobekli Tepe, there's no doubt that the population around Gobekli Tepe were all hunter-gatherers when Gobekli Tepe started to be made.
And that's the weirdest thing of all, because previously archaeology always used to say hunter-gatherer cultures did not have the manpower, did not have the organizational skills, could not generate the surpluses that would allow people to specialize in architecture and engineering and astronomy and so on.
So it used to be said that hunter-gatherers couldn't do that.
Now archaeologists have backpedaled on that and they're saying, well, yeah, clearly hunter-gatherers did it.
The funny thing is that during the thousand years that Gobekli Tepe functions, and it runs from roughly 11,600 years ago to say 9,600 years ago, 10,600 years ago, during those thousand years, the population of Gobekli Tepe transitions from being hunter-gatherers to being agriculturalists.
So we see two new ideas suddenly appearing at Gobekli Tepe, enormous megalithic architecture and a shift from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
And what Gobekli Tepe looks like to me is a transfer of technology.
That people who already knew how to work megalithic architecture and align it precisely to the risings of particular stars, for example Sirius, came to Gobekli Tepe at a time of chaos and cataclysm in the world.
And they sought to introduce a new way of thinking.
I think Gobekli Tepe was created as a project to mobilize the local community, to give them something to work on, to bring them together.
And it's not an accident that during that thousand years they transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
I don't see massive technical complications in creating Gobekli Tepe, except those very precise alignments.
But what I do see is a sudden appearance of something that shouldn't have been there.
And actually the interesting thing about the Amazon Joe is it's been grievously misunderstood over the years and fortunately archaeology is beginning to come to terms with it.
There was agriculture in the Amazon going back a very long way, going back at least 10,000 years, maybe further.
And we may have discussed this before, but there's this curious soil that exists in the Amazon that they call terra preta or Amazonian dark earth.
Recent investigations have shown without doubt that it's man-made and deliberately man-made, not an accidental result of refuse tips, but a deliberate attempt to make the Amazon fertile.
Mixed in there with dung, with human refuse, all deliberately put in there, not an accidental dunk heap, but a place that human beings said, we're going to make this ground fertile.
Because rainforest soils are not particularly fertile.
The fertility of the Amazon comes entirely from the fall of leaves onto the soil.
It re-fertilizes itself.
But to grow crops on the Amazon is a very different prospect.
And this is where terrapraeta really comes into its own.
And I've been standing in a pit with an archaeologist there, a terrapraeta pit, and you can see this beautiful rich soil.
And it is a mystery.
It constantly replenishes itself.
It never gets used up.
Settlers seek it out, seek out areas of terrapraeta.
And it fits with this notion that no longer a notion, it's a fact, that there was a population of millions in the Amazon 10,000 years ago.
And they were living a highly productive, sophisticated life.
They were using agriculture.
They also gardened the Amazon.
The hyperdominant trees in the Amazon are all food-bearing trees.
The Brazil nut tree, for example, which is a huge, tall tree, is a food-bearing tree.
And they exist in far greater numbers than they should do if they develop naturally.
Humans manipulated the Amazon and made it serve human needs thousands and thousands of years ago.
And then we have these enormous structures that are appearing in the Amazon, which are being referred to as geoglyphs.
They call them geoglyphs after the Nazca lines, actually.
The Nazca lines in Peru are huge ground images, sometimes geometrical in form, sometimes showing animals or birds or spiders, other creatures, often actually showing Amazonian animals.
But in the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Acre, as a result of clearances of the Amazon that have been done for farming purposes, there's this rush to just cut the Amazon down and replace it with cattle ranches and soybean farms.
Those clearances have revealed something that, again, according to the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't be there, which is gigantic earthworks, huge ones, a bit like the henges in Europe.
Enormous embankments, ditches, and in geometrical forms.
So you get enormous squares, enormous circles.
You get a circle within a square.
They keep repeating these geometrical images, and they're thousands of years old.
When we were down there just recently, we had a local LiDAR guy working with us.
These days, you don't have to even use an airplane to find things with LiDAR.
You can fly LiDAR off a drone.
And flying his drone within a mile of known structures that are outside the rainforest now, he found two more huge geoglyphs under the rainforest canopy, which will be investigated.
And this is bizarre and puzzling.
They reckon the team working on this, that's Marty Parson of the University of Helsinki and Alcea Ranzi, who's a Brazilian archaeologist and geologist.
They reckon that there's thousands of these things still under the rainforest canopy and there's a huge untold story.
So one of the places I would look for a lost civilization is the Amazon rainforest.
This would be one of the many ways in which our so-called high-tech industrialized society could learn from indigenous cultures.
We could learn a lot from them about living in harmony with the environment and about clever things like terrapraeta, clever things like curare, you know, which is another Amazonian invention, which is the basis of modern anesthesiology.
How did they do that?
There's 11 ingredients in Kurare.
And those ingredients are not active on their own.
You have to cook them all together to get this poison, which is a muscle relaxant.
Why a muscle relaxant?
Because if you're going to shoot a monkey 200 feet up a tree with your arrow, you don't want it coiling its tail around the tree when it dies.
You want it to drop to the ground.
Ayahuasca is another Amazonian invention.
And again, it consists of several ingredients, two in particular, neither of which are active on their own, but which only work when cooked together.
So what I see in the Amazon is traces of a lost science, a scientific mindset.
There's still 5.5 million left covered by rainforest.
That's bigger than the entire subcontinent of India.
And hardly any archaeology has been done.
And the archaeology that is being done is fascinating.
And it's particularly in the state of Acre in the southwest of Brazil that we're seeing these extraordinary geoglyphs.
Now I'm here with, I'm on the left there.
That's Marty Parsinen from the University of Helsinki.
And that is Fabio Filho, who's the LiDAR expert.
And that's Alceu Ranzi, who's a Brazilian geographer and archaeologist.
And we're looking at the latest LIDAR discoveries.
And there I'm about to take off in a plane with these two guys.
It was just incredible to fly over there.
I've flown over the Nazca Lines many times, but to fly over this and to see these huge earthworks on a scale of hundreds of meters sitting there, often encroached on by farms, was very, very, very exciting.
There is no conventional explanation because really it's only begun to be studied.
I'll say you first noticed them on an overflight more than 20 years ago, but it's only relatively recently that they've started to get the funding.
And I want to pay tribute to Eugene Zhong, who is a philanthropist who has provided funding for these guys to continue their work and who's also provided funding to the Comet Research Group and who's also provided funding for the DMT research that's being done at UCSD.
It was only the, it's a sort of mixed blessing or mixed curse, if you like, because the clearances made it possible for us to know that these things exist.
But the clearances ultimately will destroy the entire Amazon if they're allowed to continue.
Jacosa, on the left, a square surrounding a circle.
And here's a couple of Santa shots of Jacosa.
You can see there's a large square earthwork and a circle in it.
That's almost, not quite, but almost like the Greek exercise of squaring the circle.
It's like geometrical exercises are taking place here in the Amazon.
And again, a square with these curious scallops cut into the side of it and a circle.
There's just so much of this stuff.
Takeno, absolutely giant, giant geoglyph.
And these things really, on the old view of the Amazon, shouldn't exist.
They involve enormous expenditure of effort.
Creating these earthworks is a huge job.
If there was a lot of stone in the Amazon, I think we'd see stone circles on them as well.
There's one place further north called Rego Grande where there is an earthwork with a stone circle in it because stone is locally available.
I've talked to indigenous people there who still respect and revere them.
And they say that they were for shamanic journeying, that the population would gather within them, that there would be certain areas that might be reserved for the shamans.
For example, the square on the left, those two cut-out areas, top left and right of that square, it suggested that shamans were in there and the rest of the population were in the other area and they were undertaking visionary journeys, perhaps using ayahuasca.
Of course, the Amazonian peoples are experts in the properties of indigenous plants.
I'm drawing attention here to Severino Calazan's, this large square on the left there, which has, coincidentally, the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
It just shows you the size of that enormous earthwork.
But it's a mystery.
More work needs to be done, and much more needs to be surveyed.
And thanks to LIDAR, that can be done non-invasively.
We can spot these things.
Very small teams can go in and do a bit of excavation there and figure out what was going on.
I think the story is going to go back further and further into the past.
But when did they start using it in, like, if you see, like, the ancient Mayan civilizations, what you find in the Amazon, you don't find ancient wood structures, do you?
If you go, Jamie, if you go to the NPR, the painting of a bull, one step left from where you are, that one.
This is very interesting.
There has been an argument made by a couple of astronomers that what is depicted there is the constellation of Taurus.
And that in itself is heresy because archaeologists who want to give everything to the Greeks say that it was the Greeks who invented the constellations of the zodiac.
It's not accepted by mainstream archaeology because of their narrative, which is that the discovery of the constellations of the zodiac is given to the Greeks or perhaps to the Mesopotamians before the Greeks.
It's not thought that any human culture could have noticed the constellations of the zodiac before that, and that's really absurd because the constellations of the zodiac are on the path of the sun.
The sun rises against the background of a different constellation every month.
And how would the ancients have missed that?
Especially since the skies were an ever-present phenomenon to them in a way that they are not to us.
We're cut off from the skies by light pollution, but the ancients were not.
Brian and I were talking about one of the ancient versions of human beings, and I sent him this the other day because I read this article that I thought was amazing where it was talking about they found wooden structures that were half a million years old.
This is that same culture, Jamie, that Brian was telling us buried their dead in a very sophisticated way where they had to crawl through these cave-pad caves.
That's the result of a National Geographic Explorer and residence called Lee Berger.
And he, as you discussed with Brian, we won't go over it again, but he found evidence of deliberate burial in a very complicated, difficult cave system, which you can hardly access.
And of course, immediately this was published, and it was published in a Netflix documentary, the archaeological establishment descended on him like a ton of bricks and tried to find all kinds of reasons why it couldn't possibly be deliberate burial.
Whereas I think it would be much more interesting if archaeology tried to, first of all, look at all kinds of reasons why it could be deliberate burial, because that opens many doors.
Whereas saying, no, it's impossible, just closes, closes all the doors.
And somehow buried themselves under the topsoil and then left engravings on the cave walls, which are very similar to engravings that we find in the caves of France, for example.
This is why I sometimes wear a t-shirt and I did on the last show with you, which says stuff just keeps on getting older.
And a lot of people don't understand what I mean by that.
But what I mean by it is that archaeological discoveries are constantly pushing horizons back, but not considering the implications of that.
It wasn't so long ago that anatomically modern humans were thought to be just 50,000 years old.
Now, if anatomically modern humans with the modern brain, with our capacities and abilities, have only existed for 50,000 years, that doesn't leave a lot of room for a lost civilization to come and go.
But then we find 196,000 years ago from Ethiopia, and then more recently 300,000 years ago from Morocco.
And suddenly the expanses of time that have not been investigated in which a civilization could have risen and fallen become much greater.
And that's why it's important that stuff just keeps on getting older.
Well, it's also sort of the ultimate, if you wanted to leave behind evidence of your culture, something that if there was a cataclysm and people did have to sort of rethink the history of the world, that would be the best thing to leave.
From the scanning, the scanning just shows a void, but I'm informed reliably that the recent investigation has identified that void as another Grand Gallery, which is inside the Great Pyramid.
And the Grand Gallery is one of the wonders of the world.
Same goes for those shafts that cut through the walls of the so-called Queen's Chamber and King's Chamber.
I resist these names that archaeologists have applied to the Great Pyramid.
I resist the notion that it was the tomb of Khufu.
I resist the notion that the subterranean chamber, which is 100 feet vertically beneath the base of the Great Pyramid, was intended to be Khufu's tomb chamber, but then they just changed their minds and abandoned it.
And then they built the one that's now called the Queen's Chamber.
That was intended to be for Khufu, but they abandoned that as well.
Then they went up the Grand Gallery and they created the so-called King's Chamber.
And because it has a sarcophagus in it, and for no other reason, that is said to have been the original burial place of Khufu.
And it's Thutmosis IV or the third, if I remember correctly.
In other words, he's a later pharaoh from the time of the Old Kingdom.
And he put between the paws of the Sphinx a stela, which is called the dream stellar.
And in it, he records a dream that he had, that at that time the Sphinx was buried up to its neck in sand, and the dream was that he should clear the Sphinx.
The Sphinx requested him or ordered him to free it of sand and reveal it again in its true form.
This was at least 1,200 years after the Sphinx is supposed to have been built 4,500 years ago.
But as you know, Robert Schock and I and many others are convinced the Sphinx is much, much older than that, that it goes back 12,000 plus years.
And this is based on geological evidence of heavy rainfall, which is another interesting thing about the climate and the environment of that area, that we think of it as being desert, but at one point in time it wasn't.
Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frustrated by archaeologists claiming that they can know there was no lost civilization when they've done so little work in the Sahara, when the Sahara was, in a number of occasions during the Ice Age, incredibly fertile, very, very nurturing environment with huge river systems running through it and lakes.
It's not disputed that that was the case.
It was a kind of environment that would have nurtured human civilization.
And we really can't write off the possibility of a lost civilization until we take a much closer, much more detailed look at the Sahara.
It's just incredibly fascinating that the timeline when you go beyond the traditional timeline and you get back into where you and Robert Schock have speculated the age of the Sphinx, now you're talking about a completely different environment of lush rainforests and many, many, many resources.
We're talking about a completely different Sahara.
And Schock's evidence is of a thousand years of heavy rainfall.
That's what the Sphinx bears witness to, that it was already there when the rains of the younger Dryas and the Younger Dryas affected the Sahara with heavy rainfall.
Just as further north it changed the climate and made it much colder in the Sahara, it became much wetter.
And it's that period of rains that are the most likely culprit for weathering the Sphinx in the way it is.
But it could have stood there thousands of years before that.
And this is, again, where Egyptology tries to attach the Sphinx to a particular period.
Egyptology claims that's the face of Khafre, who was the successor to Khufu.
It doesn't look like any statues, known statues of Khafre that I can see, but let's not worry about that.
It wears the headdress that's worn by the Sphinx, best looked at in the picture top left or the Quora picture, that headdress is called the Nemes headdress.
It's the classic headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.
Not, in my view, Khafre, but the headdress of an Egyptian pharaoh.
But it's on a head that is way too small by comparison with the body.
And both Shock and I, and John Anthony West, Manusifzada, who's another excellent researcher in this field, we all feel that the Sphinx was almost certainly a complete lion at one point.
It was a lion with a huge mane.
And that that head sticking up above the plateau got very heavily eroded.
And by the time the ancient Egyptians inherited it, they decided to improve it a little bit, to cut down that heavily eroded head and put the head of a pharaoh on it.
Does it have the same sort of sophisticated proportions where they're perfect left and right as some of the other statues do, which is another incredible mystery.
That when they look at the measurements of these immense statues, somehow or another, they're completely symmetrical on both left and right side.
I'm actually not sure whether that's the case with the Sphinx.
I wouldn't be surprised because I have no doubt whatsoever that the head of the great Sphinx was carved by the ancient Egyptians who made those statues.
But the question is, what was it carved from?
What was it cut down from?
So the geology, the precipitation-induced weathering is one of the evidence, pieces of evidence for a much older Sphinx.
But the other thing is the astronomy, the fact that the Sphinx is an equinoctial marker.
You know, if you stand looking due east at Giza or anywhere in the northern hemisphere, on the spring equinox, there's three key moments of the year, four actually.
There's the winter and summer solstice, and there's the equinoxes, the spring and fall equinoxes.
On the summer solstice, the sun rises far to the north of east.
On the winter solstice, it rises far to the south of east.
But on the equinoxes, it aligns perfectly due east.
And that's what the Sphinx is.
It's aligned perfectly to due east, and it's gazing at the horizon.
And then we come to this contentious issue of who discovered the zodiacal constellations.
Because the Sphinx 12,5000 years ago was gazing at dawn on the spring equinox at the constellation of Leo.
In other words, this lion monument on the ground was looking at its own celestial counterpart in the sky.
Egyptologists dismiss that.
They say nobody had any idea of the constellations until the Greeks.
I just think they're wrong.
So astronomy and geology together combine to invite us to consider the possibility that the Sphinx may be much older than 4,500 years old.
When you say that in Gobekli Tepe, the speculation is that they use stone tools.
Yes.
Is there any evidence of bizarre cutting like they find in Egypt where it looks like they're using some sort of a cylindrical drill or whether it looks like the stone is somehow scooped out in some method that we don't understand?
And when these people are trying to date this to 11,800 years ago and say that people only had stone tools, how do they speculate that these people did this stuff?
There are some so-called pounding stones, but I find it difficult to see how pounding stones, how pounding away could have created this very fine result.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
It's the same with the incredible work that you find at Cuzco and Sacsay Huaman in Peru.
Again, they're not supposed to have had, this is supposedly recent, I think it's much older, the Incas, not supposed to have had metal tools.
They're supposed to have done all the work with stone tools.
I think it's a reach.
I think we're looking at a technology we don't understand.
But interestingly, coming out of it are these streamers.
And my colleague Martin Sweetman from the University of Edinburgh has suggested that that is representing meteors coming down from the sky, those streamers out of the tail of the fox, and that the fox was a constellation.
The problem is no written texts have come down to us from that time.
So everything in a sense is speculation.
What isn't speculation is the dating.
I have grave doubts about carbon dating in many cases, because carbon dating doesn't date stone.
It dates organic materials.
So the notion that you can date a megalithic site with carbon dating is questionable right away.
But what tends to be done is that you look for a piece of organic material that is so associated with the megalith you want to date that you can say or propose that they come from the same period of time.
I have that problem with the huge Moai statues in Easter Island.
They're not carbon dated.
What's carbon dated is the platforms they stand on.
And there's a lot to suggest that those platforms are much later than the original statues and the statues were re-erected on those platforms.
In the case of Gobekli Tepe, one of the very special things about it is that it was deliberately buried.
They ran that site for about a thousand years, from 11,600 to say 10,600 years ago, and then they closed it down.
And they went to great effort to fill up all the enclosures with rubble and to create a hill over the top of it.
And that's why Gobeklitepe then remained untouched for the next 10,000 years.
There's no danger of contamination with younger carbon from a later culture.
The fact that they found carbon in enclosure 40, in enclosure D, right by Pillar 43, dated to 11,600 years ago, does firmly connect that place to 11,600 years ago.
There are later dates from Gobekli Tepe.
All built in one go, but it stopped around a thousand or maybe 1,200 years after it started.
As though they'd achieved what they wanted to achieve.
The population had all become agriculturalists.
We move on into the Holocene, into the modern age.
And it's that moment of transition following an enormous cataclysm that really fascinates me.
I think the ancients had, or certain peoples amongst the ancients, did have a very good idea about our solar system and about the dimensions of the Earth and about the other planets in our solar system.
Again, this is something that archaeology has dismissed, but I think it's a possibility that's worthy of inquiry.
And it's also depicted as a star, as well as the sun, the circumstances, the disk of the sun, and the sun is a star.
So the suggestion is much greater knowledge of the universe than is supposed to have existed at that time.
And this is Sumer.
Sumer is supposedly the first civilization, the oldest civilization on Earth.
It goes back about 6,000 years.
But then what about the prequels to Sumer?
And let's take Gobekli Tepe into account because it's so close to Sumer.
And by the way, just within a few hundred kilometers of Gobekli Tepe is Abu Hurrera, where there is compelling evidence of a massive airburst 12,800 years ago and a complete wipeout of the local population.
I don't think it's an accident that Gobeklitepe is where it is.
Yes, massive amount of evidence on the ground, particularly what is called shocked quartz, where the quartz has been melted at temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees centigrade.
This is not caused by village fires.
This is the characteristic fingerprint of a cosmic impact.
Platinum, iridium, carbon microspherules, all of these impact proxies are found in abundance at Abu Hurreira.
But in this case, thank you, archaeology, for preserving soil and materials from that site, which allow this work to be done.
There's no doubt that a cataclysmic event took place there.
There's just a whole bunch of new papers published in the last two or three weeks on Abu Hurrera, which are further consolidating this evidence that it was subject to a very large airburst.
And that after that, within the 1,000 to 2,000 years after that, just as at Gobekli Tepe, the local population transitioned from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
It's fascinating to me how when you go to these sites and you see these where these ancient structures existed and imagine the climate and what a major factor that plays in what human beings do and what they're able to do, whether they're able to thrive because there's an abundance of resources.
And then it seems those are the places where they create these incredible structures, like the Mayans.
And where you go to a place like North America 20,000 years ago was unbelievably inhospitable.
Was terrifying and filled with all sorts of predators.
So it makes sense that the people that lived there didn't have the sort of technological sophistication that maybe people had in the where we're getting.
The northern part of North America is certainly the area that was under the ice cap until 11,000 years ago.
Waste of time looking for any sign of a lost civilization there.
Northern Europe, waste of time, because it was also a frozen wasteland.
But the areas closer to the equator, once you get down into the southern states of North America, get yourself into Mexico, get yourself to the Yucatan, the Maya culture, then you're looking at a place where civilizations could really grow and flourish.
Yeah, that's what's really interesting about just the history of North America in general, is that when you look at how the Native Americans existed and the way they lived just a few hundred years ago, that seems to be like an artifact of what life was like before that.
They were the ones after the Younger Dryas who kept the species alive, in my view, because they knew how to survive.
And I've made this point before, but if such a cataclysm were to occur to our civilization today, and I don't think it would take much to bring our civilization down.
A full-scale nuclear war, end of the story for technological civilization of the 21st century.
Another comet impact, something like the Youngadryas happening again.
Sudden sea level rises.
Consider how many cities we have built along coastlines.
A 30-foot sea level rise would destroy them.
And the psychological nature of our civilization is very entitled.
We tend to feel we've got it all made.
We take it all for granted.
We're not equipped to think about disaster descending upon us.
So if such a thing were to occur, and God forbid that it does, those survivors from our industrialized technological society, those who made it through, would be smart to go take refuge amongst hunter-gatherers.
They would be the ones who would preserve them and allow them to continue forwards.
And maybe in that process, there would be an exchange of information, just as the survivors of industrial civilization would learn from hunter-gatherers, so also they might have something to teach to hunter-gatherers.
And I think that's what happened 12,800 years ago.
This is one of the reasons why – I'm going to press that cough button.
This is one of the reasons why my work has not been cancelled and hasn't disappeared because archaeology dislikes it, because the general public today distrust experts and with good reason.
There's a good reason to distrust experts.
We've been told so many lies by experts over such a long period of time.
They so often are confident, absolutely certain, that they're right and they turn out later to be wrong that any intelligent person begins to wonder, are these experts really the only people we should listen to?
And anyway, I want to think for myself.
I don't want to be told what to think by a group of authority figures called archaeologists.
I want a diverse range of information and then I will draw my conclusions from it.
I'm not speaking of me, I'm speaking of the general public.
And I think that attitude is growing.
But at the same time, there still is a slavish adherence to the words of experts.
And we've seen that again and again in recent years.
Science says it's so, therefore it must be so.
Well, no, science is a work in progress.
Science often gets things wrong.
And because science says something is so doesn't mean it is so.
It shouldn't be a religion.
It shouldn't be like a dictate from a high priest.
It should be one bit of information that is supplied to the public to make up their own minds on it.
For example, when I published Fingerprints of the Gods in 1995, there was a whole constellation of evidence which suggested that something bad had happened to the Earth around 12,500 years ago.
But the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis didn't exist then.
So I looked into a number of possibilities that might have resulted in a cataclysm at that time.
Then, that was 1995.
2007, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis comes out.
60 major scientists published in all the big mainstream journals proposing that the Earth went through an absolutely catastrophic episode between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago, exactly the window that I was proposing.
So yes, that's very pleasant to see.
The discovery of Gobekli Tepe.
You know, Gobekli Tepe, they began excavations in 1996, a year after I published Fingerprints of the Gods.
But those excavations began to become public knowledge in the 2000s.
And the fact that we now have a giant, sophisticated megalithic site sitting in Turkey and not alone, Karahantepi, there's about 10 other sites in that same neighborhood, again was not explained by the archaeology of 1995.
It's something that fits better into the paradigm that I've proposed, that we're dealing with a lost episode in the human story.
It's also fascinating and somewhat terrifying that if the Younger Dryas impact theory is correct and it really did reset human civilization, think of how long it took for Sumer to emerge from total barbarism.
Because who knows what it was like for thousands of years?
I would suggest that there was a method of preserving knowledge, that those survivors of the cataclysm were not just looking at their immediate time, they were also looking to the future.
How can we pass down knowledge to the future?
And one of the ways you can pass down knowledge to the future is something like the Great Pyramid, which is so big it can't be destroyed.
And another way you can pass down knowledge to the future is in wonderful stories that people will keep on telling.
And those stories may contain scientific information.
The storyteller doesn't even need to know that information.
As long as he or she tells the story true, the information will be passed on.
And we are a storytelling species.
So that's why I take myths very, very seriously.
I think they are important evidence of our past.
I think archaeology is making a mistake in ignoring myths.
And it needs to pay much, much more attention to them.
They were not fit to survive in the new world that was created by that impact six, six million years ago.
They were not suited for survival in that world.
And we may not be suited for survival in this world largely through our own behavior and our own mad obsessions with ideas that are filled with hatred and lead people to despise one another instead of looking for the best in one another.
I've been lucky enough to travel extensively all my working life, live in many different countries, and I have no doubt that people are the same all over the world.
The same hopes, the same fears, the same dreams.
I love the cultural diversity of humanity.
This is one of the beautiful things about the human race.
So many different cultures bring different important pieces to the party.
I love that.
I would never seek to get rid of that.
But underneath that cultural diversity, we are human beings.
We love our families.
We have hopes and ambitions for the future.
We have dreams.
All of us do.
Whatever side of a particular argument we're on, you get down to that basic level, we're all the same.
And I believe what unites us as a species is much more significant than what divides us.
And we need to start paying less attention to what divides us and more attention to what unites us and to celebrate our diversity at the same time without saying, my diversity is better than yours.
It's just so difficult for that message to get through when you have these governments and these groups of control that have the narrative that they speak to, whether it's like North Korea where they completely control it or there's the United States where it's a lot of propaganda and they have control of the mainstream media.
And also, the notion that we need leaders at all is a questionable notion in my mind.
I'm not sure human beings do need leaders.
We need administrators, organizers.
We live in large, complex societies.
There's a need for organization.
But leaders with charisma, with power who impress others of their ideas and who attract a following, that is the road to ruin.
That is what we're on at the moment.
I don't see a single leader anywhere in the world right now who I like or who I feel attracted to or I feel who offers some hope.
I think you had Robert Kennedy Jr. on the show.
To me, he's an interesting American politician.
I don't know a whole lot about American politics, but he seems to be a free thinker.
My litmus test for any leader in an advanced industrialized country is what's his position on drugs?
What's his position on the war on drugs, his or her position?
Are they going to maintain this strict control, this legal penalties for people choosing to alter their own state of consciousness?
Or are they going to realize that our consciousness is fundamental to what we are as human beings and that we as adults must have the sovereign right to make choices about our own consciousness, including taking drugs.
Even if those choices annoy others, we should still have the right to make those choices.
And I don't see many politicians who are saying, actually, what we should do is legalize all drugs.
I think we should.
I think all drugs should be legalized and then accompanied with wise advice.
There's no evidence that the war on drugs has had any success in controlling the use.
There are dangerous drugs.
There are drugs that I would not advise people to take.
But the way to do it is not to impose draconian penalties on people for exploring their own consciousness.
The way to do it is to offer wise advice, which people take seriously.
Right now, the advice that comes out of drug agencies around the world is not wise advice.
And everybody knows it's stupid and they don't go along with it.
So a politician who says, I'm going to legalize all drugs and I'm going to accompany it with wise advice that will help people to make informed decisions.
And yes, like other things in our society, drugs should be limited to a certain age group.
I think the age of 21 is a good age.
I think teenagers can suffer quite badly from drug use.
And I think it'd be a good idea if they didn't.
But I know from having had teenage children myself that teenagers will, by and large, do what they want to do.
Now, this is very interesting, and this connects with a fundamental American value, as I see it, which is the value of individual freedom.
Individuals, adults, not children, should be allowed to make decisions about their own health and their own bodies without some authority figure preaching to them or even sending them to jail.
Well, there's also real results that show that when you're exercising, it's 1.25 times more effective than taking SSRIs for depression.
Yeah, regular exercise is one of the most effective methods of mitigating some depression.
There's different levels of depression, clearly, and some of it seems to be chemical, and there's a lot of misconfusion and misunderstanding about that even.
It's just so bizarre that a culture that makes things like psilocybin illegal legalizes opiates.
Legalizes prescription use of opiates.
And if you've seen any of the documents, like the Netflix series Painkiller is a great example of what they did to get the entire country on board with this idea that pain is something you should manage with opiates on a regular basis and stay on it.
And very often what happens is that the individual who's been prescribed opiates for pain, the doctor withdraws a prescription, then they have to go on the black market to acquire it.
A lot of it comes from the work I've done with ayahuasca over the years.
It goes back to a near-death experience I had in my late teens, massive electric shock.
I left my body, was up around the light, saw myself slumped on the floor, and then I came back into my body.
But from that moment, I doubted whether I am just my body or whether there's more to me than that, more to all of us than that.
Ancient Egyptian ideas about this realm being a theater of experience where we come to learn and to grow and develop, we're obliged constantly, every day, to make choices, and those choices define us.
And those choices may be very small or they may be very large.
But we are learning, hopefully, from these.
And I just don't think that this is an accident.
This is my belief system.
I don't commit to any of the monotheistic faiths, but this is my belief system, that this is a special place, that we are here to learn and to grow and to develop in a world that has consequences, where there will be consequences to the decisions that we make.
I like the Buddhist idea of going through multiple incarnations and eventually reaching a state of perfection where you embrace nirvana.
But some come back, the bodhisattvas, they choose not to go to nirvana.
They come back as teachers to teach human beings how to better and improve their lives.
And, you know, people oftentimes dwell on mistakes and think that that defines them.
And it can be a real problem, particularly with young people that are insecure, that have had some sort of a disastrous thing happen, like business failure, being fired, become a drug addict, go to jail, whatever it is, steal something.
And then you're defined by the worst mistakes that you've made, and that becomes you forever.
And, you know, even older people that make mistakes, like this idea that you should know by a certain time, like, look, this is a constant evolving adventure that we're all on.
And if you're a person who's 35 years old and you feel like, oh my God, how could I fuck this up so bad at 35?
I'm such a loser.
Like, no, this is just what happens with humans.
These are mistakes.
People make mistakes and you've got to be able to rebound and learn from it.
And it's really important to be able to make mistakes and to learn from them.
And that's another problem with leadership, which is that the whole leadership structure seeks to protect us from making our own sovereign decisions about our lives.
And to deny us the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes.
We've all got to be these perfect creatures that go through life producing and consuming and not causing any trouble.
I think in regards to drugs, there is a realization, there's a reality rather, that if we do make drugs legal for everyone, there are going to be people who try drugs that would not try them if they were illegal.
Because now they are sanctioned.
And that there will be a period of time where human beings are going to have to figure out what to do and what not to do and adjust.
And hopefully they could do this without propaganda.
Hopefully they could do this without drug commercials that tell them what's good and what's bad.
I mean, the fact that we still allow them to advertise drugs on television is so bizarre because what they're doing is romancing you into the idea that this is your solution.
And oftentimes it's for people that are depressed or for people that, you know, like, and then you see these people at the cookout having a great time because they took this pill.
But it's strange that that is legal because human beings are so easily influenced by advertising, by having something associated with joyous music and these images of people having this festive gathering and laughing together.
And you're in a dark place.
And you see that and like, that's what I want.
And it's just trickery, this weird game that we're allowed to play on people.
And they get full governmental support in order to do that.
Why are antidepressants out there?
Because people get less efficient when they're depressed.
So antidepressants make them perhaps, although I don't think antidepressants work.
They certainly didn't work for me.
Perhaps make them more malleable, more amenable members of society.
Alcohol isn't too much of a threat to society.
Yeah, it's a very dangerous drug.
It causes thousands of deaths.
It causes violence.
It causes road accidents.
But it doesn't challenge the status quo.
People are not drinking a beer or a bottle of wine and having thoughts that are anti-establishment.
That tends not to be what happens.
Whereas the psychedelics, they do challenge the status quo.
They do lead people, and I've seen this again and again, and it's been the case with me, to question the existing power structure in society and to say there must be something better.
There must be some other way to do things than the way we're doing them now.
It's also the way it captured the public zeitgeist, the way it captured people's predetermined opinions on things.
Because there's a certain group of people that don't investigate things, and they prescribe to a predetermined notion of what's good and bad, and what is safe and not safe, and what's the right way and the wrong way to do things.
And it's not a well-thought-out sort of philosophy.
It's something that they've just sort of adopted, and they've adopted from their culture.
And our culture has some very, very goofy ideas.
Literally based on what happened during the hippie movement and the Nixon administration and then all the subsequent propaganda that came after that, like just say no, and this is your brain on drugs.
It's a very crazy situation that we confront with the war on drugs.
And fundamentally, I think there's an issue of human rights which has just been completely neglected by the war on drugs.
But we, the government, can tell you what to experience in the inner sanctum of your personality.
And we will allow certain drugs which happen to make huge amounts of money for our friends in the pharmaceutical industry.
And we'll not only allow them, we'll celebrate them and we'll advertise them in every possible way.
But other drugs will not allow.
That's very un-American.
America is a country that celebrates and that enshrines individual freedom.
And I love that about America.
And one of the good things about the legalization of cannabis in whatever many states it is, 2020 plus, is that all those prognostications, all those warnings that legalization would lead to catastrophe turn out not to be true.
And that there are experiences that are available and that have been known about for thousands of years all over the world that can help you grow as a human being.
But the way we find this out is by letting them be legal and letting people who understand them explain to people what the dangers are, develop protocols based on effective dosages, and also explain what people can't do, why they shouldn't do it, what medications you're on that you shouldn't take these things.
And Amanda has been very effective over the years in getting legislation changed and in funding research into psychedelics.
And one of the things I know that Amanda is looking at is hospices that offer psychedelic therapy.
And I think that would be very useful.
You're not obliged to take the psychedelics.
It's a free choice.
But they would be available in a setting with experienced practitioners who know what they're doing, who know how best to offer these medicines to help people transition through the death process.
Which is, to me, one of the weird things about rigid atheism, this concept that when your brain shuts off, when your body dies, consciousness ends and it's just blank.
And it's just our ego that wants us to believe that there's something more and greater afterwards.
And a lot of them believe that at least some of the beliefs of organized religion are just mythical, foolish notions that people attach themselves to in order to comfort themselves, but that they, of the superior intellect, don't need those comforts.
It starts often on one side of the head and it just grows and grows and grows and it completely dominates you and there's a full-body malaise and you feel sick and your stomach gets all knotted up.
And if I don't treat it, I am looking at three to four days in a darkened room wearing an eye mask.
I'm so sensitive to light.
The pain is agonizing and I get this sense of those are what in the midst of a bad migraine are one of the few times I just feel life is not worth living.
Get me out of here.
I just don't want any more of this.
So I rely on these tryptans, but triptans turn out to be quite closely related to dimethyltryptamine.
And on this, let's put that shot up again.
On this session that I had with Francisco, I focused the whole session on please help me with my migraines.
That was the whole thing it was about.
And I didn't have the entity encounters and I didn't have many of the things that happened with ayahuasca, but I had, this is going to sound nuts to people who think I'm nuts, but I'm going to say it anyway.
I had a circle of serpents that appeared in front of me and they were all intertwined around each other.
And they came closer and closer to my forehead.
And in the middle of them was a bright light and it came right down onto my forehead.
And I started to feel afraid, as one does in a deeply altered state of consciousness sometimes.
And I was kind of backing off and I said, I want this to stop.
And a voice said to me, just shut up and get out of our way.
We're trying to help you.
And I said, OK.
And I surrendered.
And I let it go the full course.
The net result is that in the three weeks since then, when I might have taken 15 or 20 of those pharmaceutical medicines, I've taken one.
Just one.
And I can't help associating it directly with that ayahuasca experience and focusing my intention on that happening.
As you're aware, the mainstream is gradually beginning to embrace psychedelics.
We're finding far from being the demonized substances that Richard Nixon and co.
wanted us to believe they were, that they're incredibly helpful to people, whether it's with depression, whether it's with migraines, whether it's with end-of-life fears.
Psychedelics are being tested and tried out in universities all around the world and producing very, very interesting results.
Now, I know Brian mentioned this on your show, but there is this new technology which is extended DMT.
When you or I smoke DMT or vape it, we're looking at a 10-minute trip.
It might linger a little bit longer than that, but it comes on really fast.
It's ferociously powerful.
The sense of entering a seamlessly convincing parallel realm is ferociously powerful.
It can be scary, but it's so overwhelming and so sudden and so enormous that by the end of it, you kind of wonder what happened there.
It's hard to process the experience.
With extended release DMT, which has been given either as an injection or as an intravenous drip, you can keep volunteers in the peak DMT state for an hour or more than an hour, the peak state that you would get when you've just taken those four hits on the pipe.
That state can be extended for an hour or more if the volunteer wishes it.
Many of the studies that are doing this now give the volunteers the option to opt out and say, I've had enough.
I don't want more of this.
But by and large, most people go through it.
So there's two projects which are now underway.
And one of them is at the University of California, San Diego.
It was launched with a $1.5 million donation from philanthropist Eugene Jong.
I've put a link to a story there from USCD about this research.
But what he's doing is he's infusing psychedelic doses of intravenous DMT for 60 minutes.
It's Dr. John Dean who's leading it.
He's using fMRI to study the extended state DMT.
He's looking at the entity phenomenon particularly.
Vast number of people who've worked with DMT experience encounters with entities, and those entities communicate telepathically.
Of course, the mainstream would say that's rubbish, it's just your brain on drugs.
But it's a mystery.
And they're going to decode these visual activities.
And the creation of new extensive altered states research into human potential.
What this boils down to, it's focused on measuring whether a person's consciousness can extend past the physical body during trance or hypnotic states.
And of course, if that were to check out in these investigations, we're now looking at opportunities for people to volunteer for these projects and to report their experiences in detail.
They're going to be having people on DMT in one country and at the same time simultaneously people on DMT in another country.
This work is happening in Switzerland as well.
And seeing if there's some kind of out-of-body element.
This is stuff that mainstream science wouldn't have touched a decade ago, but now is interested in it.
And, you know, that's a very positive thing.
Well, if we can get proof of a mappable realm, that's the exciting, that's the exciting potential of this research, is that we are so focused on the physical world that we think all exploration is to be technological, that we are supposed to, that we're going to explore other planets, we're going to explore the solar system, we're going to explore the universe.
Why is the human body producing DMT as a natural endogenous brain hormone if it doesn't have some very important function?
And maybe that function is to shake us out of this locked-in state where we're locked into the physical realm and our needs to survive in that physical realm gives us a brief holiday from that and allows us to encounter a wider reality that we've otherwise shut out from our consciousness.
This is a hypothesis to explore.
And I'm really, really happy that it is happening at the University of San Diego.
Anybody who wants to find out more about it, it's down there at the bottom.
You can go to the Center for Psychedelic Research at UCSD.
There's a URL there.
And the point of contact is the lead scientist, which is j1dean at health.ucsd.edu.
Anybody wants to find out more about this research, which is starting, I believe, in the spring of 2024, they can get in contact with John Dean and see if they're interested in enrolling in the investigation.
There's only one word for it, and that's censorship.
It's the kind of thing you expect in the Soviet Union or in North Korea, but it's not the kind of thing you expect in so-called democratic Western civilization.
Not only that, but so-called democratic Western civilization on a website that's run by progressives.
Like, isn't being a progressive about an objective assessment of all the information and relaying it in a way that enriches the public's understanding of the subject, not lying or by lying by removing information.
It's also the fact that the format itself is such a terrible way to have long-form discussions.
You have a time limit for each person.
You have to cut for commercials.
You're doing it in front of a live audience, which is very performative in the first place.
Like who gets the cheers and who gets the laughs?
Like they win.
And they're dunking on each other.
It's ridiculous.
It's such a ridiculous way.
But I don't want to talk to them.
I talked to Kennedy because I was just, I know that there's this narrative that he's a kook and he's an anti-vaxxer and none of those things are true.
And I wanted him to explain himself.
And he said that that was the first time in 18 years of talking about this stuff that someone has actually just let him talk.
And no one's jumped in because people are if you're on a network and someone starts talking about vaccine safety and the issues with certain ingredients and vaccines people are like hit the brakes.
This has been refuted.
What you're saying is not true.
The FDA says this and that and this.
And they have to.
They have to jump in.
The executives would be in their ear.
The producers would be in their ear.
Jump in.
They'll put up things that stop them.
Like, let the guy talk.
Let's, at the end of what he says, then ask him, How did you come to these conclusions?
Have you ever steel manned the opposing positions?
Are there times where you've questioned what you believe?
Have you been vaccinated yourself?
What do we know about these peer-reviewed studies?
What do we know about the way they're allowed to access information?
What do we know about the vested interest, financial vested interests involved in pursuing a very specific narrative?
And has there been resistance to all these other points?
And how could you get that kind of compliance with a supposedly progressive website to step in and censor someone over something not just benign, but seemingly very useful?
I know for a fact that my Wikipedia page, which announces that I'm a pseudo-scientist and promote pseudo-scientific ideas, that my Wikipedia page has been captured by a group of people who have been intensely critical of me since the 1990s.
So that cannot be an encyclopedia.
That cannot be a fair and unbiased position.
That's representing the position of a particular small group of people.
So I would say that political candidates should be willing to do long-form interviews with you or anybody else who's willing to do it.
Then we're going to get to their hearts.
We're going to see actually what kind of person they are.
And as I've said before on your show, if I could make it compulsory, I would also require any person heading for high political office to have 12 sessions with ayahuasca or with extended routes.
You need 12 because the first few can be overwhelming.
Or nothing.
Nothing can happen sometimes.
It's a medicine that you need to work with for a long time.
But what it does is it opens the heart and it opens the mind.
And I would suggest that people who want to be leaders either might end up leading in a much better way or might end up choosing not to be leaders at all.
Well, that's what's fascinating about what's going on right now with the public's understanding of psychedelics and this new acceptance of it, that we are at the precipice of a global war.
And we are also at the precipice of a global understanding of the benefits of psychedelics, and they all seem to be battling it out for who wins this race.
And it's a crazy thing for people to hear that psychedelics could save humanity.
And the reason it's a crazy thing to hear is because we've had, what, 50, 60 years of propaganda, which has drilled itself into the brains of so many people.
A lot of people just don't think about this at all.
I was going to say that one of the great benefits that people are getting out of this is people on the right are now embracing psychedelics because they see the benefit that it has for soldiers, for police officers, for vets, people with PTSD.
So, in my circles of people that I know, military people and a lot of people that were very right-wing, they're now embracing that as like, okay, this is just more government bullshit.
It's not that drugs are bad and hippies are losers, and if you take drugs, you're not going to do anything with your life.
It's a different narrative now.
It's like, oh, they've lied to us about that, too.
And what they've done, the way they've done it so legally and so carefully, and the way they've established these studies and showed the benefits, that it's opening people's eyes in a way that like step by step.
Yeah, that it's it's it's not about drugs destroying society.
They can destroy some individuals, but the way to mitigate that is not making everybody a child to the will of the adult who doesn't even have these experiences.
It's a better understanding of why and what's going on.
Absolutely.
What inherent trauma is causing people to gravitate towards these incredibly harmful drugs in the first place?
And is there a way to mitigate that in our societies?
But the only reason it sounds ridiculous is because for so many years, we've been subjected to a mass of propaganda telling us that it is not ridiculous.
Telling us that it's ridiculous.
This is the problem.
That mindset has been almost engraved in stone in human consciousness.
If anybody's interested in this, these are breakthrough scientific endeavors, which are investigating a mystery that has been taboo for far too long.
And the comparison with SETI and NASA is a good one, because at the moment, as a species, we're devoting our explorations entirely into the physical realm.
Yes, we may build high-tech spacecraft that can go even to other star systems.
Maybe we will.
And that's a really important thing to do and a really useful thing to do.
But while we remain largely ignorant about ourselves and what we're doing here and what's happening in our inner realms and what is revealed in altered states of consciousness, we haven't done enough.
And there's a role for exploration in that realm too.
Not simply random explanation.
Anybody who wants to take DMT is welcome to, as far as I'm concerned.
But targeted exploration to see what happens in the DMT state.
What are these entities?
Why is it that people from different countries in different cultures encounter clearly the same entities and receive the same messages from them?
Do we all have some kind of brain module that just makes this up?
Or as we were saying earlier, does it just open the door to a whole other level of reality that we're normally shut off from and which may be extremely helpful to us?
It may also be extremely dangerous to us, who knows?
But without exploring, we're never going to find out.
You talk to people about parallel dimensions, that the notion of parallel dimensions has been accepted by science.
You're like, what are you saying?
Like, what does that mean?
Like, parallel dimensions.
And unless you've had a psychedelic experience, it does seem super abstract.
It seems like something that people just say.
It doesn't seem like something that which is one of the weirder things about psychedelic experiences, that when you're there, you're like, how is this real?
And why is the experience of dreams very similar to the experience of psychedelic states in that once it's over, you have a very profound memory initially, and then it sort of slips through your fingers.
Because most regular, like if you see like a car accident, it's burned in your mind for a long time.
I mean, you might have a distorted version of it because the human memory is very flawed.
But you will remember the trauma of like, you bet.
You'll see it.
You'll see it over and over again.
So many things in my life that I've watched, like especially like violent encounters, I've seen them over and over again.
Whereas the dreams that we have, which are so wild when they're done, like some of them I can't wait to tell people about them because they're so crazy.
And then 10 minutes later, I can't remember what it was.
I think the more ways that we talk about survival, but one of the things in that issue is that human beings are equipped to experience altered states of consciousness.
If altered states of consciousness were really bad for them, and if there's anything at all to evolutionary theory, evolution would have got rid of them.
We wouldn't be able to access altered states of consciousness.
The fact that they've been preserved in human beings, the fact that we have this capacity, suggests that somewhere in our story, even though we may be in a very vulnerable state if we're under ayahuasca or smoke DMT, something suggests that it is useful to us in some way.
And it's been preserved in the genome, the capacity to access altered states of consciousness.
Well, it's probably also one of the reasons why they made it a ceremony, where there's people that watch over you, there's a very specific protocol, the way they handle it, the set and setting, and it's not everyone doing it all at the same time where the entire village is vulnerable.
So long that once something gets ingrained in society, it's very difficult to remove it.
And it's a big struggle.
And many people's lives have been ruined, not by drugs, but by the punishments they've received for possessing and using drugs.
Those ruin lives.
So the new work that's now being offered with extended state DMT, rather than that 10-minute rush of overwhelming experience, is offering the possibility to spend an hour in it and to navigate it and explore it much more much more carefully.
So I'm very interested in that.
And I think it is at least as valid as the exploration of outer space.
And if it does turn out to be a mappable place, and if it does turn out that people are encountering the same entities and the same entities that are trying to express the same information, that would be really, really fascinating.
And they understand you in a way you don't even understand.
And they can explain things in a way that just like completely, you go, oh, okay, I get it.
One of the things that I've experienced in it that is so bizarre is the notion of what your energy does to other people and what that energy does to other people that experience it.
And I think there's a lot of young people that think that's a good thing to do, to attack people you don't like.
I think it does something to you, whether you like it or not.
Definitely.
I think it has an effect on you whether you like it or not.
There's things that I don't like about people, and I will criticize behaviors and actions of specifically of like leaders of the world that I think are taking us down a terrible path and what their motivations are.
But at the end of the day, what we're doing here is interacting with each other.
And the more positive interactions that you can facilitate, the more that you can make your time and your communication with people positive, it will literally spread out from them.
You can change the way people think about interacting with people just through your own interactions with them.
I've met people like that where they're so interesting.
Don't forget the red button.
There you go.
I've met people that are the way they think is so interesting that it's profoundly affected the way I think.
And then I've taken from them whatever admirable characteristics that they had.
I know that a lot of people like when someone interacts with their fans and I understand that.
But it's just the possibility of it being bad for you is just too much.
You know, you could kind of cultivate an environment where only positive people interact with you, but then you're going to get some bullshit that way too.
You're going to get a distorted perception because you're censoring people, literally.
It's better to just let people talk and just like stay out of it and just do your best.
On this issue of hurting other people or not or retribution, I'd just like to bring up that we were originally going to be here on the 24th of what we're recording this on the 24th of October.
There was going to be Dr. Flint Dibble, who's an American citizen, but he teaches at the University of Cardiff in Britain.
He's an archaeologist, an experienced archaeologist, and he was one of the several archaeologists who most viciously and painfully attacked me after the release of Ancient Apocalypse.
John Hoops at the University of Kansas was another.
You, on our last show together, you issued a challenge for a debate.
And I said I'd be willing to debate any serious archaeologist who was willing to debate me.
John Hoops at the University of Kansas immediately backed out.
He wouldn't debate at all.
But finally, Flint Dibble said he would.
He would like to take up that challenge.
And the sad thing is that Flint, this is open knowledge because Flint and I published a joint statement on social media.
Flint is suffering from a bad cancer right now.
It was diagnosed after he accepted the challenge.
He's on heavyweight chemotherapy.
And I feel for him.
He's been hateful to me.
I don't want to hate him back.
I know he's coming from a place of sincerity.
I know he genuinely believes I'm wrong.
And I really welcome the opportunity to debate with him on your show openly for three hours to have a detailed discussion.
But it's not his fault that he's not here today.
It's because the chemotherapy has made it just impossible for him to function in this kind of setting.
And we are provisionally talking about coming back on your show in April 2024 when he hopes to be over the worst of the chemotherapy to do that debate.
And I look forward to it and I hope that it'll end up being a reasonable exchange between two human beings rather than two human beings hating on each other.
The problem is when these people that are creating these incredible drugs, these scientists and doctors and these people that are having these amazing medical advancements, they're connected to something that just wants to make money.
The people that are selling the drugs and the people that are running the companies are completely different than the scientists that are legitimately developing these things, and many of them turn out to be very effective for all sorts of ailments and diseases.
So I sent this to you, Jamie.
Overlooked miracle drug for cancer, why big pharma fears fenbesdazole.
Has at least 12 proven anti-cancer mechanisms in vitro and in vivo.
It disrupts microtubulate polymerization.
Major mechanism, induces cell cycle, whatever that means, arrest, blocks glucose transport and impairs glucose utilization by cancer cells, increases P53 tumor suppressor levels, inhibits cancer cell viability,
inhibits cancer cell migration and invasion, induces apoptosis, induces autography, induces, they're trying to get me with all these words, prioptosis and necrosis,
induces differentiation and sesenence, senescence, inhibits tuner angiogenesis, reduces colony formation and inhibits stemness in cancer cells, inhibits drug resistance and sensitizes cells to conventional chemo as well as radiation therapy.
Yeah, well, we've created a society that seems to be designed to make us sick, and then Big Pharma steps in with so-called remedies for it, which happen to make some people a lot of money.
So hopefully he will do well with this and come through it on the other end and we'll have a respectful conversation and maybe we both can learn something or all three of you can all three of us can learn.
And I'd like to say on the record, I don't hate archaeologists.
I know that there's a lot of great work that's done by archaeologists.
I myself could not do the work I do were it not for the work that archaeologists have done out there in the field, painstakingly digging and producing evidence.
I have huge respect for archaeologists.
I think there's a very limited group within archaeology who have this domineer mentality and who seek to control the narrative.
But by and large, archaeology is doing a good and a useful thing.
And I don't want it's unfortunate that I've been identified as a hate figure by a number of archaeologists.
I think there's much more potential for cooperation.
And I'm not the only person working in this field of the possibility of a lost civilization.
Consider Randall Carlson, consider Robert Schock, many others.
Manus Saif Sada, who you don't know, but he's brilliant, taught himself Egyptian hieroglyphs.
He can read the Egyptian hieroglyphs fluently.
There's a lot of people working in this field whose information could be of use to archaeology if archaeology would just lower its threshold a little bit to ideas it doesn't like.
And again, it's probably not most our it's probably most archaeologists are probably very curious about this.
It's probably a very vocal minority and a power dynamic that exists in so many different aspects of civilization, where groups of people control anything.
They're very reluctant to give away that kind of power.
Especially if what they're doing is just discovering ancient stuff.
I mean, it's not even like you're creating anything.
You're literally in control of the information that forms the narrative for ancient civilizations, which is something pretty much anyone who acquires the data can do.
Another thing that we talked about recently that I sent you was this new AI ability, that AI has the ability to translate some of these ancient languages now, which is really interesting.
It's a mystery on a tiny island, 2,000 miles from Tahiti and 2,000 miles from the South American coast, a tiny island that they have their own fully evolved script.
That is hard to explain.
And it's one of the things that makes me think Easter Island's origins are much older than we're taught.
So what would, how would AI, without a Rosetta Stone, without something that connects two together, because that was one of the ways that they deciphered.
If it weren't for the Rosetta Stone, we could not read the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It so happened that a relatively late period of Egyptian history, when the Greeks were running Egypt, the Ptolemaic dynasty, that they wrote down a stella in three languages, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the more recent form of ancient Egyptian called hieratic, and in Greek.
And that gave them the key.
From that, our whole knowledge of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs has arisen.
But an interesting point is: if you go to Mexico, for example, you'll find that the conquistadors built churches on top of so many ancient Mexican sacred sites.
The Great Pyramid of Cholula is an example.
It has a huge cathedral now built on the top of it.
We've hardly had the opportunity to talk about it today, but there's just so much.
And if I were to focus on a particular area of Mexico that needs further investigation, I would say the Olmec civilization around La Venta, Villa Hermosa, and right up as far as Chichenitsa.
That whole area of the Yucatan is just absolutely fascinating.
I think there's a bunch of factors that seem to be working in favor of this happening.
One of them being materialism.
I think materialism makes people want to buy the newest, latest, greatest stuff, which fuels innovation, especially technological innovation.
And I think that if you looked at humans from afar, and I've said this many times, so forgive me.
But if you looked at humans from afar, you didn't have any understanding of us.
Like, what do they do?
Well, they make better things every year.
Every year they make better things.
It seems to be like they have a bunch of other things that are going on, controlling resources and war, but that really seems to be about controlling of resources and money, and that seems to be involved in making better things.
And they're using these better things to have more control over the people.
They're using these better things to have better warfare, more effective weapons, and all these things kind of lead to… The big money goes into that kind of thing, yeah.
Right, and they lead to the emergence of an artificial being.
It's just, I think that as our biology fails and people are looking for new alternatives to bad eyesight and all sorts of other things that are wrong with us.
And so I think our only alternative would be to emerge with it.
That's the only way we're going to survive.
Because I think the crudeness of the biological model that we exist in, like the crudeness of our physical bodies, is so difficult to escape.
It's so ancient.
It's like this code is the same code that was Australiopithecus.
And it was like all these animals are living in savage environments.
And we have all these built-in human reward systems that are so problematic.
And these are the things that are exploited by social media and by so many of the problems that we talked about earlier.
Exploited by leaders, exploited by – and I think that if we do create a sentient artificial intelligence, the only hope that we have to survive is to become one with it.
But for me, I think the best way to do it is to try to stay off of it most of the day and occasionally dip my toe to see what the fuck is going on in the world.
But it takes too long.
It sucks in so much of your time that you don't really have for other things.
it's so compelling I've reached a stage in life where there's sounds very unconstructive this but there's just stuff I don't want to learn I don't particularly want to learn how to use a cell phone fluently.
The thing is, once it has the ability to make its own decisions, it's probably going to radically reshape the way resources are used.
It's going to try to figure out a way to balance out what the fuck we're doing to the ocean, what we're doing to our skies, and come up with something.
Okay, for example, in experiments, a participant listening to a speaker say, I don't have my driver's license yet, had their thoughts translated as, she has not even started to learn to drive yet.
Pretty close.
Listening to the words, I didn't know whether to scream, cry, or run away.
Instead, I said, leave me alone, was decoded as started to scream and cry, and then she just said, I told you to leave me alone.
I mean, look, if you have someone that can do something like the pyramids, why would we assume that they wouldn't be able to also create a universal language?
And who knows what kind of technology they're dealing with?
I mean, we love to just apply what we know as the only technology that's available to an advanced civilization.
And that seems to me to be silly because we've been on a very specific path.
It's one of my feelings about looking for a lost civilization is that the one thing we shouldn't do is look for ourselves in the past.
We need to look for something very different from ourselves.
A lot of archaeologists say, oh, if there was a lost civilization, they would have left plastics behind, which rules out the possibility they might have decided not to develop plastics or might have decided, might have developed something much more effective.